The Simple Joys of Life!: Only a few day's left!

So last week went by so fast and we are slowly getting down to the final day's left of the amazing experience. With the last week of summercise and and then taking everything down it really has been a slow progression to something that just seems so weird. Is it really almost the end. I have been thinking about how I would feel about this all summer and now that it's here, I don't know if I'm ready for the new change. So summercise went on as usual this week and finally the weekend came. It was a really great weekend. On Friday, Alex, Renee, Seiji, and I went out to this place called Cripple River. It's a gold miner's camp site that stays out there all year and they serve dinner and have a gold drawing and dance the night away! It was really a blast and I finally got to see some gold for the first time. After the dinner we went to go dance and karaoke the rest of the night. So at around 1am we were getting ready to leave and making our way back down the beach about 20 miles and crossing a river in a truck was an adventure. Well when we only had about 7 or so miles left, seiji's truck felt like we hit a wall of sand but really the transmission went out and we were stuck in the sand with about 10 feet from the water and it was almost high tide! After a hour of trying to get the truck unstuck we decided to call some people for help. Well there is not cell phone service out there so we try to start walking up the tundra to find some service. Finally after numerous attempts to call people Renee's phone dies and Seiji's just doesn't work. I'm still trying to use mine and Alex can't get a signal at all. Alex looks ahead and see's a small cabin that could have some people in it so Seiji and her try to get help. Well sure enough even at 3am people are still willing to help us get unstuck. After we are unstuck we still can't drive the truck into town, so we continue to call people, then finally we call our local church pastor Bruce and he and Chase (another intern that helped with summercise) drove out to save us in the wee hours of the morning. As we sat in the cabin and waited the two miners were telling us about how bears have been in the area lately and if we would have tried to walk back to town we could have been killed! Well when Chase and Pastor Bruce showed up we could not have been more thankful to them for getting us. On the quad ride back Pastor Bruce tells us that they saw a bear on the beach when they were going down to get us. Great to know that they both had guns with them! Well we get back to the apt at around 5am and freezing cold but I just wanted to sleep and be warm. After taking a shower and going to sleep I woke up around 9:30 and was really energized for the day!
Alex, Renee, and I went for a hike with one of our supervisors Kendra. She is so awesome to take us out on a hike with her, but don't worry she brought a gun too! So this hike was about 6 hours long and only because I fell and hurt my ankle and my pride was in the way of asking for help so I crawled some of the way back to the car. But other then that it was such an awesome hike. Because of the adventures of Friday and the hike, Alex, Melanie, Trinity (who is 7) and I decided to have a girls night and paint our nails, and bake cookies! That was a really fun night. On Sunday it was a great day to spend at church and with our friends before the community event. I will tell you more about the community event in the next blog! But here are some great pics from the hike and such!